Why were we offline - Is gwolf banned?

Several people have wondered why were Nadezhda’s and my site offline this weekend. Well, it surely raised my ego ;-) What happened? As many of you know, this blog is hosted in my home machine - A Mac Mini connected by DSL. A couple of weeks ago, my ISP announced the doubling of our connection speed (it was 512/128k, it got increased to 1024/128, so it’s not exactly doubled, specially if you are used to saturating the upstream channel… but anyway). From then on, we started suffering all kinds of connectivity problems. The connection would drop several times a day, it would be sluggish at times… I decided to wait a bit, to let them upgrade their whole network. Anyway, it didn’t happen. Nadezhda was pissed at it, as she is our main user - And just to make sure I was not doing NAT wrong in my server, I decided to set up my DSL modem (a SpeedStream 5200) as a router instead of a switch. Yes, Ta^3, some people never learn ;-) In short: I hosed the connection, and had to work with Prodigy Infinitum’s staff on getting it back online. Contrary to the popular belief, Infinitum support is up to the task, customer-friendly and helpful (although they insisted on me shutting down my Linux server and configure it from MacOS - I don’t blame them, after all. Thank $deity I didn’t have to set up a Windows machine after all!). But after recovering connectivity, the speed still sucked. I was prompted to use a temporary account, which they provided me, and the connection was just perfect, 10KBps upstream, 105KBps downstream. WTF?! Well, the girl told me that my login/password pair had a problem (?!) and I needed to change them. Ok, no sweat, we changed them, so I’m no longer gwolf@prodigy - I had not even used that mail address, so no worries. What happened? Well, as my username/password is the same for all of Prodigy’s services (dialup, Wifi hotspot and DSL), and as I have lent it to a couple of people over the years, I just guess they penalized me :-/ But… Why wouldn’t they tell me about that? Not even after changing my login/passwd (no, they would not keep even the old login) Why wouldn’t they request me not to share my credentials? Go wonder.

Comments

vicm3 2007-01-16 14:37:26

Re: Why were we offline - Is gwolf banned?

Jeje… pus vieras que no me di cuenta, el lector de rss, por lo visto hace caching… en todo caso :D aun colocando el speedtream en modo router… se puede regresar a bridge ;D… en casa tengo un setup curioso, tengo ya una de las madrolas 2wire por consumo de energia y la maquinita linux, provee QOS y shaping a otro segmento… :D